Quick Links - Poets.org

follow poets.org

Search form

The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

related poems

Born on July 23, 1959 in Everett, Washington, Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Wild Is the Wind, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January 2018; Reconnaisance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), Silverchest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Riding Westward (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). His collection The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); The Tether (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (Graywolf Press, 1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (Graywolf Press, 1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (Northeastern University Press, 1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

His work has been anthologized in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (Vintage Books, 2003), edited by J. D. McClatchy; Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (St. Martin's Press, 2002), edited by Helen Vendler; Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (St. Martin's Press, 1988); Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Vintage Books, 2000). His poems have also been chosen eight times for the annual Best American Poetry series. Phillips is also the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2004), and the translator of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (Oxford University Press, 2003).

His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

Ancient Greek and Roman writers, especially Thucydides, Cicero, and Tacitus, were an early influence for Phillips. He studied their work extensively in college, and through them learned "how forceful syntax can be in conveying nuance" as well as the use of "compression when conveying psychological and emotional crisis." Later, while studying with Geoffrey Hill, he discovered English Metaphysical poets such as George Herbert and John Donne.

According to the Judges' Citation for the 1998 National Book Awards, "Carl Phillips's passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts."

Phillips served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. He is Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the creative writing program.

Porcelain

As when a long forgetfulness lifts suddenly, and what
we'd forgotten—as we look at it squarely, then again
refuse to look—is our own
inconsequence, yes, it was
mostly like that, sex as both an act of defacement and—
as if the two were the same thing—votive offering,
insofar as the leaves
also were a kind of offering, or could
at least be said to be, as they kept falling the way leaves
do: volitionless, from different heights, and in the one direction.

by this poet

Then spring came:
branches-in-a-wind. . .
I bought a harness, I bought a bridle.
I wagered on God in a kind stranger—
kind at first; strange, then less so—
and I was right.
The difference between
God and luck is that luck, when it leaves,
does not go far: the idea is to believe
you could

Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse forWhy not stay awhile, usually that hour whenthe coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve alwaysowned the place and had come back inspecting nowfor damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? Historyhere means a history of storms rushing the